We’ve just released Ondsel ES 2024.2, the second public version of our flagship desktop CAD application with built-in collaboration tools.

Now that the basic assembly workflow is mostly complete and operational in Ondsel ES, we are beginning to add new tools. One of the features coming in the next release are exploded views.

“Once you get past the part design workbench in [software], it becomes apparent that [software] is like 10 different software packages integrated into one.” — r53toucan on Reddit.

if you think this user is talking about FreeCAD, you're wrong. It’s CATIA — a generations-old 3D CAD program that served as an inspiration in the early days of FreeCAD. The two programs share more than just some core concepts: they’ve been struggling with many of the same issues and went in different directions to fix them.

A lot of companies that use CATIA are interested in migrating away and are looking at open-source alternatives. It's a good time to look at the reasons why and consider what they could be looking for in an open-source program such as Ondsel ES.

One of the conclusions in the user survey series is that the SheetMetal workbench is really important for users. 9,2% respondents rely on this addon to do their job, it’s also the third most popular choice for what to pay money for by professionals and the fourth most popular choice overall, after UI/UX, TNP, and Assembly WB.

Even calm and steady professionals can get to the point where they’ve just had enough. And for many architects out there, having to use Autodesk Revit on a daily basis is really that kind of a frustrating experience.

Revit is what most architects learn at school and then use at work. To give credit where credit is due, it has many fine points. You don’t get to be #1 if you don’t get the job done. However, it’s really slow, there are data intellectual property concerns, the subscription price is rising year over year, Autodesk management doesn’t seem to have a coherent vision for the product’s future and they don’t listen to customers nearly as much as they should have, and that’s not even the entire list of issues.

In this post, we’ll focus on just one aspect of this love-hate relationship: interoperability. Let’s talk about IFC and why Autodesk should take notes from emerging free and open-source tools for building information modeling (BIM) authoring.

This is the last post in the series where we discuss the takeaways from our recent user research. We already looked at basic demographics data and the use of 3rd-party addons for getting a job done. Now it’s time to talk about things that annoy users so much they are willing to pay to get these issues nuked from orbit.

Ondsel is committed to improving the user experience and we spend a lot of time listening to our users. We often hear the same suggestions and complaints that we’ve heard before but sometimes we get surprised. One of those surprises came out of our recent user survey.

Some users were surprised to learn that FreeCAD has a CAM workbench. Even though Path has been part of the core FreeCAD experience for more than nine years, it seems many users didn’t know about it.

FreeCAD has been designed as an extensible CAE platform from the ground up. There are currently more than 200 addons available through the Addon Manager alone, ranging from large workbenches to simple macros designed to do one job.

As part of the user survey, we looked into the use of addons. This is the second part of the series. If you missed it, you can also read what we found about user demographics.

Last month, we ran a user survey to better understand who FreeCAD users are: how they use FreeCAD, what they do at work, what major gripes with the software they have, and more. Over the course of one week, 650 people answered our questions and provided extended insights. They learned about the survey and came to it from more than ten different websites and social media platforms.

FOSS projects often struggle to build and follow a coherent development roadmap that lets contributors add new features while also improving code quality, removing deprecated features, and generally improving the application. After all, it’s more fun to work on new features than it is to write unit tests, refactor code, and fix bugs.